First of all thanks to everyone for the hard work being put into DNN 6 :)

I am just wondering why DNN is choosing to use Telerik instead of JQuery in DNN 6?

If DNN are serious about attracting more people to use DNN then it seems to me that JQuery would be better to use for popup windows, tooltips, editors, validation, grids etc.. as JQuery is already used millions of websites around the world compared to Telerik which may be lucky to have just thousands of developers.

DNN 6 has moved from vb to c# as there are more c# developers in the world yet they have now chosen to use Telerik over JQuery?? This does not make sense to me as there are many more millions of developers & designers who are already familiar with JQuery.

Apart from having to maintain yet another framework, adding further unneeded bloat to the DNN framework & causing unnecessary upgrade issues I cannot see why Telerik is being used in the new UI overhaul.

Another very important point to remember is that as far as I am aware (please correct me if I am wrong), because  the Telerik controls are server side controls, skin designers, website administrators, xmod users, openwebstudio users, form & list users, ventrain new article users etc.. will not be able to do things like match the new core form patters & ui design as all these will have been created using server side controls.

For example: a website administrator will not to be able to edit a standard HTML module have a picture or group of pictures open in pop windows that look the same as the new core UI as the core UI will use server side controls (Telerik Rad Window). If the core UI was using a JQuery solution like "JQuery UI" or "ColorBox" then both backend & frontend designs/developers could use the same code & keep a clean consistent UI throughout the platform.

Designers & developers need to work together, using JQuery instead of Telerik will help make this happen!

DNN 6 will also support JQuery UI, i.e. developers have full choice of controls to use. All Telerik controls will be included using "wrappers", i.e. DNN controls containing the Telerik controls, which may be freely used by any extension developers as well, some will simply replace existing asp.net controls in the framework. The benefit of Telerik is a much better productivity, once a developer learned to use it.

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Cheers from Germany,
Sebastian Leupold

   

Speed up your DNN Websites with TurboDNN

Adam,
Both jQuery and Telerik have their uses and serve very different needs.  Not all module developers will be comfortable with client-side development and will feel a lot more comfortable with tools like Telerik.  Other developers are looking for a very lean development platform and prefer the use jQuery for much of the heavy lifting.  This is not an exact science and we are still drawing up guidelines to help our own developers understand when it is appropriate to use each tool.

The other added constraint is that we don't want to deploy 100 different tools and licenses with DotNetNuke, we need a couple of tools which we can rely on to meet 99% of our needs.  jQuery is great because of the availability of plugins, but the reality is that we have to be very selective about the tools we choose to include with the platform because people will come to rely on it, and if it is not flexible enough, or have a solid team behind it, we could quickly find ourselves with an orphaned plugin.

Finally, just because a feature is implemented a specific way in the CTP does not mean that it will be implemented the same way in the final release.  We implemented the original popups using Telerik, created a version using pure jQuery, another version using jQueryTools and finally settled on a version using jQueryUI which you'll see in CTP 3.  At each step of the way, we identified behavior that we liked, behavior we didn't like and behavior which we felt was crucial to getting the feature just right.  There is still some work to be done in this area, but as you'll see in the upcoming CTP 3, the popup implementation has changed quite a bit and the behavior has been cleaned up a little (although still not in its final form).

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Joe Brinkman
DNN Corp.